1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to containers, such as transfer trailers, used for transporting solid material loads.
2. Description of the Related Art
Waste disposal within a community has typically been accomplished by using community landfills. Garbage route collection trucks pick up garbage from houses and local businesses and would transport the garbage to community landfills. This was an acceptable method when waste disposal for an entire community could be accommodated by smaller landfills.
With the ever increasing production and accumulation of garbage, however, community landfills are no longer adequate to accommodate disposal of an entire community's waste. Consequently, regional landfills are being increasingly developed and used to receive waste from multiple communities.
Regional landfills have made the transporting of garbage by garbage route collection trucks to the landfills impractical. Regional landfills are often located great distances from the communities in which the garbage route collection trucks pick up garbage. Thus, many areas have begun using transfer trailers or other containers, such as, for example, roll-off containers to transport solid waste material initially collected by garbage trucks to the regional landfill. This prevents the need for many smaller trucks making the same journey to the regional landfill. Thus, the use of transfer trailers or other containers to haul waste to a regional site is a more efficient and cost-effective method of transporting waste once it has been collected from homes and local businesses.
Typically, the garbage collected by a garbage route collection truck is taken to a transfer facility where the garbage is unloaded and then reloaded to a transfer trailer or other container using some type of loading machine. Garbage route collection trucks generally cannot dump their loads directly into transfer trailers or other containers because the maximum inside dimension of such containers is not larger than the outside dimension of the garbage route collection trucks. Thus, directly loading waste from the garbage route collection truck into the containers results in a large amount of waste being spilled. The width of transfer trailers and other containers is regulated by federal statutes and therefore, cannot be permanently enlarged to accommodate the size of garbage route collection trucks. On the other hand, efficiency demands require maximizing the amount of garbage that each individual garbage route collection truck can hold, thereby making it impractical to reduce the dimensions of the garbage route collection trucks.
What is needed is a transfer trailer or other container that can be efficiently transported, which is designed to accommodate the size of garbage route collection trucks for directly loading waste contained in the garbage trucks into the containers with minimal spillage of the waste.